If you’re thinking “What is the population of the United States near the turn of the millennium?” your collection of trivial knowledge is truly impressive and I wouldn’t want to oppose you in Final Jeopardy. In this case, however, you’d have the wrong answer…er, question. The question we’re looking for here is “How many records were compromised among breaches investigated by Verizon Business in 2008?”.

Yes, you read that correctly. I’m as flabbergasted as you are. We knew the number was big when we recently started combing through last year’s statistics in preparation for the upcoming 2009 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), but I don’t think we quite knew it was THAT big. To put this number in perspective, that means 9 records were compromised for every second that ticked by in 2008 – and that’s just among the cases Verizon Business investigated! To put that in further perspective, you may remember that in the 2008 DBIR we reported a figure of 230 million records from cases we worked between 2004 and 2007.

What happened? We’re currently up to our data-loving eyeballs trying to put together an answer to that question. We will have it to you on April 15 in the form of the 2009 Data Breach Investigations Report…so stay tuned.

Dr. Peter Tippett, VP of Research and Risk Intelligence for Verizon Business Security Solutions, was recently interviewed by Robert Richardson at Information Week about the Data Breach Supplemental Report. Visit the links below to listen.

Listen to Part I

Listen to Part II

By Wade Baker

Today, we released a supplement to our 2008 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) that focuses on four major industry groups. As many of you know, the original document compiled four years of data from over 500 cases worked by our Investigative Response team and was intended to be a kind of “state of the union” look at recent security breach and data compromise trends.

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By Wade Baker

Since releasing the 2008 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) in June, we’ve frequently been asked some form of the following question: “Do the findings presented in the report differ among industries?” It’s a good question, and one we’re working on answering at length in a supplemental report contrasting the four most frequently breached industries (Financial Services, Tech Services, Retail, and Food & Beverage) using the original dataset. We plan to release the report sometime next month, but would like to give you a sneak peak in this post.

You may remember that the 2008 DBIR considered three main sources, or origins, of data breaches: external, internal and partner. The upcoming supplemental report naturally adopts this same trio of sources. Based on Verizon Business caseload from 2004 through 2007, the figure below depicts the percentage of breaches attributed to internal, external and partner sources for each industry group.

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Bryan Sartin, Director of Investigative Response for Verizon Business Security Solutions, was recently interviewed by Michael Johnson at PodTech. Visit the links below to listen.

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At considerable investment in time and resources, Verizon Business began an initiative in 2007 to identify a comprehensive set of metrics to record during each data compromise investigation. As a result of this effort, we pursued a post-mortem examination of over 500 security breach and data compromise engagements between 2004 and 2007 which provided us with the vast amount of factual evidence used to compile this study. This data covers 230 million compromised records. Amongst these are roughly one-quarter of all publicly disclosed data breaches in both 2006 and 2007, including three of the five largest data breaches ever reported.

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